Tomás Saraceno’s Bubbly ‘Cloud Cities’ Go Floating at SFMOMA

Tomás Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009

You don’t have to be an expert on solar aerostatics, bubble geometry, or neural networks to appreciate Tomás Saraceno’s trippy, site-specific installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But it probably wouldn’t hurt. Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities, on view from December 17 through May 21, is a futuristic fantasy world made up of a series of 10,000 floating nodes and reflective panels, suspended from the ceiling and walls, that together create the illusion of a cloud of bubbles. The work, part of Saraceno’s larger Aerocene project, imagines a future in which we all live in free-floating, carbon-free cloud cities. Another recent project of his involved launching and flying solar-powered balloons around the world, demonstrating the fossil-fuel-free superhighway right above our heads.